Edit: Confused about the downvoting here—is it a ‘the Forum doesn’t need more of this community drama’ feeling? I don’t really include that much of a personal opinion to disagree with, and I also encourage people to check out Lincoln’s whole response 🤷
Personally, I’m still struggling with my own relationship to EA. I’ve been on the EV board for a year+ - an influential role at the most influential meta org—and I don’t understand how to use this role to impact EA.
If one of the EV board members is feeling this way and doesn’t know what to do, what hope for rank-and-file EAs? Is anyone driving the bus? Feels like a negative sign for the broader ‘EA project’[1] if this feeling goes right to the top of the institutional EA structure.
That sentence comes near the end of a longer, reflective comment, so I recommend reading the full exchange to take in Lincoln’s whole perspective. (I’ll probably post my thoughts on the actual post sometime next week)
The answer for a long time has been that it’s very hard to drive any change without buy-in from Open Philanthropy. Most organizations in the space are directly dependent on their funding, and even beyond that, they have staff on the boards of CEA and other EA leadership organizations, giving them hard power beyond just funding. Lincoln might be on the EV board, but ultimately what EV and CEA do is directly contingent on OP approval.
OP however has been very uninterested in any kind of reform or structural changes, does not currently have any staff participate in discussion with stakeholders in the EA community beyond a very small group of people, and is majorly limited in what it can say publicly due to managing tricky PR and reputation issues with their primary funder Dustin and their involvement in AI policy.
It is not surprising to me that Lincoln would also feel unclear on how to drive leadership, given this really quite deep gridlock that things have ended up in, with OP having practically filled the complete power vacuum of leadership in EA, but without any interest in actually leading.
Hello Habryka! I occasionally see you post something OP critical and am now wondering “is there a single post where Habryka shares all of his OP related critiques in one spot?”
If that does exist I think it could be very valuable to do.
I think this is the closest that I currently have (in-general, “sharing all of my OP related critiques” would easily be a 2-3 book sized project, so I don’t think it’s feasible, but I try to share what I think whenever it seems particularly pertinent):
I also have some old memos I wrote for the 2023 Coordination Forum I would still be happy to share with people if they DM me that I referenced a few times in past discussions.
Yeah I’ve seen that. I think costly-signalling is very real, and the effort to create something formal, polished and thoughtful would go a long way. But obviously i have no idea what else you’ve got on your plate so YMMV
I agree that it’s useful to make this more visible here, thank you!
[Flagging that I only know my own very limited perspective, and I don’t expect that Lincoln has done anything wrong, it’s just that I don’t see much from where I’m sitting] I found that statement a bit confusing, because as a person who works at CEA, I barely knew that Lincoln was on the EV board, and I have never heard about him interacting with anyone at CEA (though it seems likely that he has done this and I just don’t know about it). I feel like this is complicated because I don’t know what the best practices are wrt how involved a board member should be in the details of the organization; I could imagine there might be good reason for board members not to be reaching out to individual employees and pushing their pet causes. But he specifically said he was “worried about the EA Forum” in his comment, and yet I do not know what any of his views on the Forum are, and I have never heard of him sharing any of his views on the Forum with anyone on the CEA Online Team. So I am left feeling pretty confused. I’ll just say that I have directly reached out and offered to talk with him, because as you can imagine, I am very interested in understanding what his concerns are.
Edit: Confused about the downvoting here—is it a ‘the Forum doesn’t need more of this community drama’ feeling? I don’t really include that much of a personal opinion to disagree with, and I also encourage people to check out Lincoln’s whole response 🤷
For visibility, on the LW version of this post Lincoln Quirk—member of the EV UK board made some interesting comments (tagging @lincolnq to avoid sub-posting). I thought it’d be useful to have visibility of them on the Forum. A sentence which jumped out at me was this:
If one of the EV board members is feeling this way and doesn’t know what to do, what hope for rank-and-file EAs? Is anyone driving the bus? Feels like a negative sign for the broader ‘EA project’[1] if this feeling goes right to the top of the institutional EA structure.
That sentence comes near the end of a longer, reflective comment, so I recommend reading the full exchange to take in Lincoln’s whole perspective. (I’ll probably post my thoughts on the actual post sometime next week)
Which many people reading this might feel positive about
The answer for a long time has been that it’s very hard to drive any change without buy-in from Open Philanthropy. Most organizations in the space are directly dependent on their funding, and even beyond that, they have staff on the boards of CEA and other EA leadership organizations, giving them hard power beyond just funding. Lincoln might be on the EV board, but ultimately what EV and CEA do is directly contingent on OP approval.
OP however has been very uninterested in any kind of reform or structural changes, does not currently have any staff participate in discussion with stakeholders in the EA community beyond a very small group of people, and is majorly limited in what it can say publicly due to managing tricky PR and reputation issues with their primary funder Dustin and their involvement in AI policy.
It is not surprising to me that Lincoln would also feel unclear on how to drive leadership, given this really quite deep gridlock that things have ended up in, with OP having practically filled the complete power vacuum of leadership in EA, but without any interest in actually leading.
Hello Habryka! I occasionally see you post something OP critical and am now wondering “is there a single post where Habryka shares all of his OP related critiques in one spot?”
If that does exist I think it could be very valuable to do.
I think this is the closest that I currently have (in-general, “sharing all of my OP related critiques” would easily be a 2-3 book sized project, so I don’t think it’s feasible, but I try to share what I think whenever it seems particularly pertinent):
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wn5jTrtKkhspshA4c/michaeldickens-s-shortform?commentId=zoBMvdMAwpjTEY4st
I also have some old memos I wrote for the 2023 Coordination Forum I would still be happy to share with people if they DM me that I referenced a few times in past discussions.
Yeah I’ve seen that. I think costly-signalling is very real, and the effort to create something formal, polished and thoughtful would go a long way. But obviously i have no idea what else you’ve got on your plate so YMMV
I agree that it’s useful to make this more visible here, thank you!
[Flagging that I only know my own very limited perspective, and I don’t expect that Lincoln has done anything wrong, it’s just that I don’t see much from where I’m sitting] I found that statement a bit confusing, because as a person who works at CEA, I barely knew that Lincoln was on the EV board, and I have never heard about him interacting with anyone at CEA (though it seems likely that he has done this and I just don’t know about it). I feel like this is complicated because I don’t know what the best practices are wrt how involved a board member should be in the details of the organization; I could imagine there might be good reason for board members not to be reaching out to individual employees and pushing their pet causes. But he specifically said he was “worried about the EA Forum” in his comment, and yet I do not know what any of his views on the Forum are, and I have never heard of him sharing any of his views on the Forum with anyone on the CEA Online Team. So I am left feeling pretty confused. I’ll just say that I have directly reached out and offered to talk with him, because as you can imagine, I am very interested in understanding what his concerns are.